People Who Expect A Big Microsoft Comeback Sound Increasingly Delusional...

Many huge market trends continue to move against Microsoft, and the company's responses to them
have not yet done much to change its fortunes.

Jay's article continues to be very widely read, and it has
prompted a strong response.

Some folks, often in Silicon Valley, think Jay is dead right.
Silicon Valley wrote Microsoft off long ago.

Others, who remember Microsoft's "fast follows" and destruction
of early market leaders in the 1990s, still think Microsoft
doomsayers are missing the big picture: Microsoft will come from
behind to crush "consumer" companies like Apple and Google, the same way it always has.

With every year that goes by, this latter view seems increasingly
delusional. Microsoft has always been an intensely strong
competitor, but the market tides have moved against it. In the
case of the Internet, Microsoft has now been in "comeback" mode
for 17 years--and it's still miles behind the leaders. In the
case of mobile, Microsoft is still running a distant fourth.
Meanwhile, Apple's iPhone business, which was only created 6 years
ago, is
now bigger than Microsoft's entire company.

Yes, Microsoft is still strong in the enterprise. And, yes, Apple
and Google have only dipped their toes in the enterprise market.
But even in the enterprise, the world is changing. The
"consumerization" of the enterprise is now allowing employees to
drive the IT adoption process and decisions, not the IT
department. And "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) policies are
driving huge sales of iPhones and iPads for business use.

Microsoft's best hope is likely to double-down on its strong
enterprise position and try to own it. But even that will be
challenging given the rise of cloud-based apps and mobile
computing, which Microsoft does not control.

In the 1990s, Microsoft used to say that the PC was the center of
the world--that all peripheral devices would be driven by it.
That was true once. But not anymore. Now, the cloud is the center
of the world. And the PC is just once of many devices that run on
top of it.

Here's one of the Microsoft-still-rules-the-world notes we've
gotten.

Jay -

You really need to understand how most businesses run
systems, visit a data center some time and have conversations
with some IT Directors/CTOs at Fortune 1000 companies, as I
have. In NYC I urge you to visit 111 8th Ave or 60
Hudson.

First off, 90% of the world still runs Windows. APPL does not have any products
of relevence but the iPhone, 70% of their revenues come from this
one product, so they are as much a smartphone maker as Starbucks is a coffee house. To make such
silly statements about iPads displacing PCs is just very amateur
on your part. Tablets are not productivity tools,
regardless of who makes them, unless you typed your article on
one as well. Tablet market is much too "green" to speculate
or extrapolate on any futures right now.

I literally watched MS steam roll Novell, Sun Microsystems, NetScape, AOL, (Lycos, Alta Vista, HotBot, and
others). Many brick and mortor businesses are tied into MS
for LAN/WAN, ERP (Dynamics), Sharepoint, Outlook and now
Mobile/Surface computing will be hitting. I also witnessed
the dot com bubble rise and burst, AAPL has all the makings of
this type bubble, actually many parallels with AOL.

Corporate IT Departments in this day and age are not about to add
AAPL products that cost 3 times the price and only allow them to
do what AAPL dictates. AAPL will always be a consumer
product due to their use of the "command" button versus the
"options" button, "It just works," at the price of control.

The fact that AAPL has even made it this far is that they gave up
on WordPerfect and other products that never gained universal
appeal. AAPL is confused they want to be
Proprietary/Lock-down, but their entire recent growth/appeal is
based on "allowing" consumers to use MS Office, IOS
(Unix-based)...

You need to realize overall as a tech writer that hardware in
general is dying (content is future…Jeff Bezos gets it), and there isn't anything
luxurious about technology, look at the Vertu sometime.
Most tech seasoned folks know hardware is only good for about 3
years, then time to upgrade. Much of iPhone's success is
also due to the carriers subsidizing the phones by $400 a pop, if
consumers really paid $600 per phone as a few did at the initial
release of iPhone, AAPL would not even be around for us to be
discuss them.

I think more and more people are realizing that AAPL keeps USB
ports, HDMI ports, 4G and other simple features from them in their
products to keep profit margins healthy...